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With a focus on production ready features, Tcat Server has become the leading enterprise Apache Tomcat in the world. As more and more leading organizations are adopting Tcat Server and using it to run their most demanding applications, we have been hearing from them about the features they need for gaining better visibility and for managing their applications in production.

We are pleased to announce General Availability of Tcat Server 6 R4, which represents the result of this feedback and is the most comprehensive product in the market for organizations using Tomcat in production.

This release includes:

Global dashboards: Our customers have been telling us that while Tcat Server provides a single pane of glass for managing their Tomcat instances, they wanted to see a summary of all of their instances, the status of their applications as well as actionable information, all without drilling into each server instance. Global dashboards address this by providing a view of your entire Tomcat environment, web applications, status of current deployments and potential issues on one single screen. Similarly, the ability to view important metrics on a per-server basis is now also possible via server dashboards. Many of our customers’ applications expose data via JMX metrics, and being able to graph them to see the trends is now possible via these server dashboards.

Dashboard provides visibility into all Tomcat instances

Intelligent alerts: Our customers told us that they want to prevent performance and availability issues with their web applications before end-users notice them. They want to be notified about these problems directly via alerts, as well as integrate with monitoring solutions in their Network Operations Center (NOC). Tcat Server now provides this alerting capability. Users can set threshold, availability, and log scan alerts for their Tomcat instances and web applications, and these alerts can be sent via email or to a monitoring solution such as Nagios.

JMX metrics: while previous version of Tcat Server provided deep diagnostics and collected detailed metrics, our customers were telling us that they were missing some critical metrics, which are exposed by their web application as a JMX MBean. To address this gap, we are adding full support for JMX metrics. Users can plot custom JMX values in a graph to see trends, set alerts on the values and browse the available JMX metrics.

Fine-grained security permissions: Our customers are running their mission-critical applications on Tomcat, so they want to restrict access to these servers only to staff who are directly responsible for day to day operations. However, broadly restricting access often poses a problem, as they need to bring in developers to help diagnose problems from time to time. Our customers wanted to provide limited access to developers so they can view relevant information without being able to control applications and Tomcat server instances. Tcat Server 6 R4 addresses this by providing fine grained security permissions that can be assigned by the user’s role. This security model is highly customizable to fit your organizational needs.

Whether you are IT ops managing Tomcat in production, or a Devops looking to improve communication and collaboration between development and operations, or a Spring developer deploying and configuring your webapps, you will find Tcat Server a must have. The best part is that the product continues to be free for use in development and pre-production environments. If you are responsible for keeping your web applications and Tomcat instances running well, you owe it to yourself to download and try this latest version of Tcat Server.